Cellular car phones have become very popular in recent years, particularly in large urban areas where great amounts of time are spent in cars commuting. The typical car phone consists of a handset piece that is supported in a cradle between the front seats or near the legs of the driver. The car phone may be operated in two different ways. The number can be dialed while the phone is in the cradle and then picked up and the conversation held or the handset unit can be picked up and the number dialed outside of the cradle.
In either instance the eyes of the driver must be removed from the road, at least temporarily. Since it is common to dial up to ten digits, the area code and telephone number, before contacting the Send button, it is quite common to mis-dial telephone numbers. This is particularly the case when the phone is dialed while in the cradle. Since it currently costs about $0.50 to transmit each telephone number, even if it is a wrong number that is dialed, it is quite annoying and costly to dial the wrong number. Accordingly, more time than would usually be expected is spent dialing a number.
While some cellular car phones do provide a memory recall feature, this is useful only for dialing numbers that had already been preprogrammed and has no use on most calls. Even in those situations, it is still necessary to dial the particular code for the stored number, again requiring the driver take his eyes off of the road.
In either event, it is common for the driver to want to view the display of the number dialed before pushing the Send button. Since the display is relatively small and is not easy to see in the first place, it takes a relatively long time to view the number shown on the display. It is not uncommon to have to look back and forth from the road to the telephone a number of times before it can be determined that the right number has been dialed by the user.
While there have been voice chips that have been integrated into home appliances, no adapters to a touch phone pad or cellular car phones with built in voice chips have been made. Further, there has been no simple way of converting existing phones, including existing cellular car phones in use today, so as to have such voice capability. Further, some phone systems do not use different tones making verification of the number dialed by a blind person impossible. The use of voice capability for indicating the numbers and functions pushed on a cellular car phone is one area in particular where concern for safety needed to be addressed. Apparently, the failure of the market place to find a need for voice capability on home appliances has discouraged the use of voice chips in other equipment.
There are currently on the market many devices that incorporate voice chips that are activated by the pressing of buttons. Once such device is a talking toy book, which makes a sound or repeats a word when a button is pushed.